The Dangers of a “Good Enough” Solution: The 4 Major Shortcomings of Generic Lead Scoring

As a smart marketer, you have probably considered a marketing automation solution for your business. We know that it can be confusing to sort through all of the available solutions. And we know that every marketing team is unique and has different needs. It’s easy for a marketer to be drawn to the first solution that provides more functionality than you have today—even if it only offers a marginal improvement. We call these solutions “good enough”. True, many of these solutions provide very basic functionality to keep the lights on, but we all know that basic functionality won’t make your team shine. It certainly won’t help you achieve the best results.

Let’s take a look at a “good enough” solution in the context of lead scoring, a very important function which sorts the good leads from the bad ones. A “good enough” solution offers only basic lead scoring. Sure, some lead scoring might be better than nothing, but generic lead scoring comes with major shortcomings.

Here are the four major shortcomings that you might come up against with a “good enough” solution:

1) Associating a Single Lead Score with Each Lead or Contact in the CRM

Most of these basic marketing automation solutions have a single lead score associated with each lead or contact in the CRM. But what if you have multiple product lines? Or multiple business units? Simply put, a single lead score won’t help you determine what product or service a lead is actually interested in.

This gets even more problematic if you have sales reps that cover different products or services. How will he or she know what product a lead is interested in? What happens if you want to put your leads into nurture programs that cover different products? None of these scenarios are possible with a single lead score. However, more complete marketing automation solutions let you use multiple lead scores, which supports the way your business operates. With multiple lead scores, you can route the right lead to the right rep.

2) Generic Scoring Campaigns

Most “good enough” solutions use generic scoring campaigns. What does this mean? For instance, there may be a system-wide score associated with one action, like “filling out a form”. However, this doesn’t take into account what sort of form a lead filled out. Ideally, you want to your scoring to reflect the importance of each form. For instance, filling out a form for a late-stage piece of content or a product demo should result in a higher score than filling out a form for early-stage content. In a “good enough” solution, you don’t have that sort of control.

3) Scoring Based on a Limited Set of Behaviors

Many “good enough” solutions have a very limited set of behaviors they score, such as form fills, landing page visits, and email opens. But as a marketer in today’s multi-channel world, you need to score more—including content across the web, social network engagement, interactions at physical events, and so much more.

Complete marketing automation solutions can listen to behaviors from across multiple channels, and score appropriately. They can also take timing into consideration—for instance, if someone visits your pricing page multiple times, a complete solution will score this higher than a single visit to a generic webpage. Or if a person downloads three ebooks in one day, that should be scored higher than downloading three ebooks in one month. A “good enough” solution is unable to track these nuances.

4) Single Scoring that Doesn’t Separate Interest from Fit

A “good enough” solution rarely distinguishes whether or not a lead is a good fit for your business. To determine fit, your score will be comprised of demographic and firmographic information like company size, budget, title, etc. That makes a huge difference! For example, students and job seekers who visit your website will probably download a ton of content. Without the right scoring technology, your “good enough” solution might score them as a hot prospect. Complete marketing automation solutions let you create scores based on interest and fit. So a sales rep can see that while a person shows high interest, he or she has a low fit score and likely isn’t a good lead for your company.

Make sure you go with a solution that provides fully customizable and flexible scoring capabilities, so that you can present the best possible leads to sales. If you have multiple products, business units, or divisions, or if you want to score based on both interest and fit, the generic, single lead scoring that a “good enough” solution provides simply won’t support your needs.

Select a marketing automation solution that fits the needs of your business. Make sure you aren’t settling for a “good enough” solution that is “good enough for now”. Instead, do your due diligence and think long term! A complete solution can give you that extra competitive edge that your business needs. Download our ebook, The Dangers of a “Good Enough” Marketing Automation Solution to learn about other pitfalls of a “good enough” solution.

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